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Study Traces How Animals Tap into a Microbial Energy Reserve Believed to Be Inaccessible

This study reveals widespread enzymatic capabilities in animals to break down microbial storage compounds, impacting our understanding of carbon cycling.

27 Aug 2026

Powerful Imaging Technique Captures Gene Transcription Inside Living Organisms

All living things have a fleet of tiny copy machines that turn instructions from DNA into RNA, the molecules responsible for helping build proteins that keep organisms alive.

21 Aug 2026

Living Organisms Depend on Bacterial Production of Critical Vitamin B12

All living organisms need a little bit of it to form red blood cells and DNA, as well as to build and support brain and nerve cells. But it's hard to come by: Humans don't make it. Animals don't make it. Plants don't make it.

7 Aug 2026

Fluctuating Environments Stabilize a Self-Destructive Survival Strategy in Yeast

A research group led by Tetsuhiro Hatakeyama from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Institute of Science Tokyo have revealed how a seemingly self-destructive survival strategy could persist in yeast for hundreds of millions of years.

27 Jul 2026

Bacteria Use CRISPR-Cas to Control Diverse Innate Defense Systems

All cellular life-from humans to bacteria-possesses two layers of immunity: innate and adaptive. Scientists have long understood how these two types of immunity work together in higher organisms but not in the microbial world.

23 Jul 2026

New Microbiome Study Reveals Natural Defense Mechanism Restricting Candida Albicans

A metabolic byproduct formed when gut bacteria break down dietary fiber appears to protect against dangerous fungal infections common in immunocompromised patients, a study led by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers shows.

15 Jul 2026

Penn Study Uses AI to Discover Prion-Based Antibiotics

New antibiotic candidates for drug-resistant bacteria may reside inside prions, mis-folded protein in the brain best known for rare and fatal degenerative brain diseases.

22 Jun 2026

New Study Reveals How Introns Jump Between Species Without Viral Help

Jumping genes are parasites in the genetic material of bacteria, plants, animals and humans. They are released into the cell as small RNA molecules from ribonucleic acid (RNA) and possess complex mechanisms for inserting themselves into other parts of the genetic material within the cell, thereby often conferring new properties on the cell and thus accelerating evolution. There are also jumping genes that free themselves from the RNA using an RNA enzyme. These ribozymes or self-splicing introns are a special group of jumping genes.

22 Jun 2026

Brazilian Researchers Identify Forty Five New Toxins in Salmonella Samples

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil have discovered 45 new toxins produced by Salmonella bacteria, some of which are associated with foodborne infections.

12 Jun 2026

Formic Acid Drives Novel Electron Transfer in the Gut Bacteria

Researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt have discovered a surprising role for formic acid in the human gut: The small molecule acts as a kind of “taxi” for electrons – both within bacteria and, likely, also between different microorganisms.

9 Feb 2026

First Nationwide Microbiome Atlas Reveals Hidden Nitrifiers Across Denmark

An international research team led by Aalborg University with contributions from the University of Vienna has systematically mapped the microbiome of an entire country for the first time.

8 Dec 2025

New Evidence Shows Complex Life Began Far Earlier Than Previously Believed

Complex life began to develop earlier, and over a longer span of time, than previously believed, a groundbreaking new study has revealed.

4 Dec 2025

Ambiguous Stop Codons Expand the Genetic Code in Archaea

The beauty of the DNA code is that organisms interpret it unambiguously. Each three-letter nucleotide sequence, or codon, in a gene codes for a unique amino acid that's added to a chain of amino acids to make a protein.

2 Dec 2025

New SCOPE Tool Transforms Discovery of Gene-Regulating Proteins

A new tool greatly improves scientists' ability to identify and study proteins that regulate gene activity in cells, according to research led by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.

30 Sep 2025

Tracing Evolutionary Roots of the Genetic Code

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function.

17 Sep 2025

Genome-Wide Study Connects Human Genetic Variation to Mycobiome Diversity and Disease

A new genome-wide study uncovers evidence of the first three-way relationships between human genetic variation, variation in the fungal component of the human microbiome - known as the mycobiome - and risk of developing chronic disease.

10 Sep 2025

AI Tool for Designing Antibiotics from Scratch

In a recent Cell Biomaterials study, University of Pennsylvania researchers offer AMP-Diffusion, a generative AI tool for creating tens of thousands of novel antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) — short strings of amino acids that serve as the building blocks of proteins — with bacteria-killing capability.

3 Sep 2025

Scientists Discover New Microbial Metabolism That Breathes Iron Minerals

An international team of scientists led by microbiologists Marc Mussmann and Alexander Loy from the University of Vienna has discovered a new microbial metabolism: so-called MISO bacteria "breathe" iron minerals by oxidizing toxic sulfide.

28 Aug 2025

Untapped Antimicrobial Weapons Hidden in Archaea Genomes

A first look into the molecular defenses of archaea highlights the importance of surveying diverse microbes to discover new types of antimicrobials.

18 Aug 2025

Cryo-EM Uncovers How Tiny Protein Enzyme Precisely Trims tRNA

To build proteins, cells rely on a molecule called transfer RNA, or tRNA. tRNAs act like protein-building couriers, where they read the genetic instructions from messenger RNA, mRNA, and deliver the right amino acids to ribosomes, the cell's protein-making factories.

8 Jul 2025